


Nothing Permanent Except Change

by Zafaria



Category: Wizard101
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-03-02 16:02:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13321650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zafaria/pseuds/Zafaria
Summary: One-word ask prompt pieces that were too short to be stand-alones.





	1. Decompression

**Decompression**

  It was one of those in-between days that everyone wanted to soak up and revel in. 

  It was the dry season, and the days of torrential rain were swept away with the changing weather. But today was a change in front, so a solitary storm line rolled in, wavering for the entire day. Soft plodding of the rain on the wet earth filled Wizard City. The regulars of the Commons who stood proudly and flaunted their newest robes ran inside for the day, condemned to pass the time distantly turning over cards, their lazy hands flipping the corner of a book page.

  Brecken was inside her room, waiting for her hair to dry after dashing past the school on the slick walkways, almost tumbling in the process. Lizzy would be up soon, along with Miguel and Nora, and Lail. She had wanted to stand out in the Commons, waiting for Lail to exit the classroom so she, too, could show off her newest outfit.  It was a long tunic with cuffed sleeves, dyed purple with swirls of stormclouds around it, just like the ones that blanketed the sky that day.

  Instead, she used the wide brim of her hat to fend off the rain as gaggles of students took to awnings and the nearby shops. She caught Lizzy along the way. Word traveled down the grapevine, and they all decided to meet up and watch the cloudy afternoon burn away and darken into the cool night.

  “I brought the deck,” Lizzy entered, triumphantly holding up a golden-chased box.

  “That’s, uh, really ornate for a deck of playing cards,” Lail said as he followed behind.

   "Yeah, well that’s because they’re from Valencia! They’re fancy suits with unicorns and seraphs on them,“ Lizzy answered.

   Brecken felt blood running up to her cheeks and she awkwardly reached around to scratch the back of her head.

   "Did, uhm, did you guys want hot chocolate?” Brecken offered a tray with five mismatched mugs filled with the warm delight. Little marshmallows bobbed up and down in the drinks.

    “Yes!” Miguel wrapped his hand around a white ceramic mug dotted with pink cherry blossoms as he slide between the group and plopped on the couch. Some of the hot chocolate sloshed out over the top of his mug onto the floorboards, but he didn’t realize. 

     Lizzy reached in next and grabbed a blue mug shaped like the head of a colossus. She tossed the card deck onto the low coffee table. Her mug balanced precariously in her hand, she sat cross-legged on the floor, taking a sip of the drink before frowning and waiting for it to cool. She placed it at the corner of the table to come back to. 

    All the mugs on the tray claimed, Brecken took her spot in a simple, dark wood chair, hunched over the table with her hot chocolate on the floor. It was under the chair, inside of the front left leg, like she always had it. If she toppled it over then, in front of Lail, it just might have ended her. The music player was working it’s way through a scroll of gaudy pop-rock music, a favorite of many students, from a famous, armored musician. 

  There were some other classmates out there, in the sands and the sun, right now, she thought. Tired, haggard souls who haven’t slept in days trying to battle some primordial and ancient evil. In her mind, their hands lagged to draw out their decks from a pouch on their belts. They shook, hovering over a card for a minute before selecting it, fingers wringed and pulled taunt, duels wrought with errors.

   To be honest, sometimes they worried about the fate of the world. Over warm tea, they’d shelter in the dorm rooms in the sparse time between classes, ask what they though so-and-so was up to right then. How mortifying it was to think fate hinged on just that. The nervousness would be fended off, shoved back deep down inside the pit of their roiling stomachs, a small chuckle masking their phobias.

   Today was not a day of tea-drinking or talking about reality. Today was a day of hot chocolate with dense cream and long-winded games of poker where they gambled treasure cards.

  For now, the worries of shadows and evils were warded off by the glow of the fireplace, and fears of destruction faded away as Brecken unveiled her winning hand. 


	2. The Prince of Any Failing Empire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two of three of the one-word ask prompts.

**The Prince of a Failing Empire**

  The totem was small, hatched, and glistening from the sweat sticking to her palms. It was a miniature of a pegasus with the same haunting face as the figurehead on the mast. The one she held in her hand was bronzed.

    Each leg sat through a gap in the railing on the port side of the ship, the adjoining column between them. Her feet dangled out over the hazy skyways, loose boots slipping down, wiggling off her feet just a little like they were ready to plummet into the unknown column of air. 

    Nikita was at the helm. The ship moved in jerky lurches, but it was not being chased this time. Nikita was just terrible at sailing. 

    They were coursing through Avernus, bone drakes and their piercing teeth barred in passing. With no eyes, they still managed to watch the ship as it slowly passed, waiting for it to continue on and disappear along the verge of the horizon. Eventually, they would. But the moments scraping by the bare ribs and hollows of the skeletal drakes were uncomfortable, tense.

    Behind them, wooden debris littered the skyway. Avernus was safe in that it wasn’t safe. It was so choked with ash and vile fumes, so overrun with horrendous creatures that the automatons didn’t give chase there. It was an outlandish, insignificant speck of dust floating in the rest of the Spiral. When The Machine awoke again, it would not be tolerated. In a flash, Avernus would be vaporized with all the other worlds, not exempt from the same unforgiving fate.

    The Machine had been shut down, its rulers dismantled as gears and springs lay around in crushed and contorted forms. How cautiously people must have proceeded to that moment. The machines were calculating and exacting, and so the people who faced them, who took it upon themselves to defeat perfection itself, had to be even better. They were not of the same kind of mechanical, systematic intelligence of the automatons. They had worldly knowledge, compatriots. They had guts. Real guts that churned at the thought of the universe lost and at staring down the barrel of a clockwork marine’s infallible musket, not unwavering gears. And guts that persuaded them to fight strategically, assuring them recklessness and style would overpower the limited scheming of the automatons. 

    It did, at first. But The Machine became sentient. It had it’s own plans for how to fix the world, and stole away the genius mind of the decrepit Queen, the inhuman heart of Kane, the mysticism of Bishop, the orderliness of Deacon. 

    She tried then, too. She built Able, a clockwork with good temperament, and it would stop The Machine. And together, they did, until Able too wanted to craft a newer, better Spiral in its vision. And Able, designed to be the true master of all mechanical forms, imbued with the same emotions and understanding as a real, living person, was unbeatable. The Armada was rebuilt under their newest, most perfect leader. Nikita and her looked up at Valencia as the marble buildings and crowded streets evolved to gears, and residents were enslaved. And then the residents were replaced by more machines, because even as workers and lower beings they still were not good enough. She cried, something the clockworks could never understand. 

    Together, her and Nikita stole a ship and slipped away in the dark fog over Valencia as isles deemed unnecessary were grinded by the floating Machine into stardust and useless gunpowder. The Machine traversed much of the known lands, pagodas warped between gears, bungalows compressed and compressed, further and further. When they made their way through the mechanics of the Machine, they were nothing more than splinters of wood hovering the sky, waiting to be collected and incinerated.

    “It’s not always your fault. I mean, sometimes it is, but not always. Not this time, anyways,” Nikita reassured her from the helm. Her confidence in her words was so innate, her eyes never broke from the sky in front of her, hands slowly pressing down the knobs of the wheel and the ship shimmied left and then right.

    “Yeah… yeah.” She looked down at the shiny artifact cupped in her palm, frowning. Biting into her bottom lip, she hurled the pegasus out into the skyways and watched as it tumbled endlessly. 


	3. A River Runs Through It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last of the three shorter one-word ask prompts

**A River Runs Through It**

     There, on the side of the old library, in black, unmistakable letters, was a collection of both terrible and thoughtful graffiti.

    “GOD IS DEAD AND WE ARE IN HELL” took up the most space on the gritty wall. 

    Moira stopped in front of it to read some of the additions that were made by transients, groveling around and searching for supplies before continuing on. It was rare anyone stayed put for more than a few hours, and paths rarely crossed. When they did, one person would be balanced on a rooftop with a rifle peeking out over the tiles, a finger tauntly curved around the trigger. The other would be creeping around on the ground. They would look up, see the barrel aimed towards their oblivious head, and give a meek, anxious wave. The sniper would wave back, and the two continued on in their patrols.

    Moira had missed when the students sat together around the Commons, sharing snack cakes and stories, trading cards and laughs. A crazy belligerent necromancer brought Wizard City down, raising hoards of undead from the graves scattered around the area. The infestation began in Haunted Cave, Nightside, and Sunken City, and poured out into the other vibrant areas. Not many people were left. There were no more safehouses. 

    Moira sometimes wondered whether there were other safer worlds, or if everywhere was infected. Maybe there were old classmates holed up in some dingy apartment around Regent’s Square; or maybe they were just dragging along behind her, wrists cracking and flesh sloughing off, hungry to bring devastation to anything that breathed in sharp, anxious breathes when they approached. 

    Moira stood in front of the wall, reading.

     _I saw the River Styx today. It flows through the three streets. And in the center of the Commons is the Lake of Fire._

She remembered when it all wasn’t as melodramatic and Hell comparisons weren’t even fitting. But she didn’t have time to think about it. Gurgling and heaving noises protruded from the tunnel behind her. She glanced back, then ran away towards the old Headmaster’s Tower where the roof had collapsed. She would lie on her stomach on the creaking, uneasy floor, scoping out the area. 

    Maybe, she hoped, she would point her scope south towards Golem Court. Any maybe there, at the top of the tower in the little circular window, she would see another figure with their rifle directed out towards her. And maybe they would wave and give a little smile, remembering the time when the only monsters were the ones they destroyed in Golem Tower.


End file.
